Latest / The Interline Podcast / AI Meets 3D Printing, Composable eCommerce, SHEIN's Valuation, And AI Shopping As A Service
Transcript
- speaker-0: So welcome to the edit from the Interline, the show where we run a quick fire analysis on our pick of the most important fashion and beauty technology stories from the last seven days. I'm Grace the social editor and I'm joined by Ben, the editor in chief, and together we have less than twenty five minutes to give you our analysis on the stories that we think really matter. speaker-1: Hi Grace, I'm still traveling this week, as people'll be able to see. We also have a little bit of a break from the usual format this time. So normally it's you quizzing just me. You are gonna quiz me afterwards on a couple of news stories. But we have a ⁓ a separate guest today, ⁓ that I will hand over to you to introduce because ⁓ she's gonna answer a couple of questions about ⁓ her own work that I think have some broader implications to what people see in the news as well. speaker-0: Yes, so like Ben mentioned, on with us today is Denite Peleg. So you're the founder of 3D Printed Fashion Lab. Your journey with 3D Printed Fashion has been pretty amazing. You started while you were a student and now you've been featured in Forbes, on the BBC. You've also grown like a massive following on social media through sharing your 3D printed process. But what we really wanted to talk about today was a recent talk that you gave for Figma's. Config conference. And you were sharing how AI prompting is now part of your design process and what you're doing with 3D printed garments. So that's what we wanted to talk to you about today. So as a first question, maybe you can just introduce yourself very briefly and also give kind of a 30 second summary of the talk that you gave at Config. Yes, absolutely. And pleasure to be here today. ⁓ my name is Denit Peleg. I've been doing 3D printed fashion for the last decade. It started as a school project. I studied fashion design. ⁓ and I was always curious about ⁓ using ⁓ different kinds of fashion technologies into my work so I can create more like custom-made ⁓ designs. ⁓ so it was ⁓ pretty natural for me to explore the world of 3D printing. it was ⁓ fascinating to see that no one else was actually using this small desktop machines. ⁓ to print textiles. ⁓ and so I had to really teach myself everything I know about this technology. and so fast forward I was started to be public speaking, talking about my work, teaching at fashion schools and working with major luxury fashion brands and sports brands ⁓ to develop their idea into through printing. and I'm always been researching better materials. So the aspect of the materials is ⁓ something that is really important for me. and my recent development is with ⁓ two partners. We developed materials that ⁓ we can 3D print that made from algae, castor, and amp oils. ⁓ so they're one hundred percent biodegradable with zero microplastics, they can come in any colors, ⁓ and they're very soft for three D printing textiles. So At my talk at config, I'm showing how I use AI in my processes, in my design process, but also in the production process. ⁓ since I started working with my agents, it's really empowered me in so many levels. So now I can actually create ⁓ like the whole process ⁓ to be completely automated. ⁓ so 3D printer, at the end of the day, they're like just robotics. So they're working so well with ⁓ with the AI agents. Like it's ⁓ it's at some point I will be able to operate the machine by itself using other robotics that will pick up the plates. I'm also showing it at my Target config. ⁓ but I'm just showing how can it start from a concept to an actual physical garment using AI in my ⁓ workflow. Yeah, it's so amazing what you're doing. Obviously it's super innovative and you're really accelerating like how we can produce 3D printed garments. But what would have to be true in order to use this technology on a mass scale and actually produce 3D printed garments in this way on a mass scale as well? So they're massived and become kind of garments that we wear day to day? So ⁓ it's we're getting there. So ⁓ not a lot like the like ⁓ AI is like empowering it and becoming so smarter like literally like ⁓ day by day. ⁓ my agents becoming smarter. They know how to do the 3D modeling. They worked with me on a software that I can ⁓ take your idea and without seeing you in person, make you address that fits you like a glove and then generate a file that I can actually send you on WhatsApp and you can print it on the other side of the world or I can send it to print in my lab. ⁓ not a lot of things needs to happen. ⁓ I think like when we comes to 3D printed textiles, we do need to improve the hand of the fabrics so they will be even more softer ⁓ and will feel more and more like fabrics we know today. ⁓ today it feels like a sort of like a power mesh fabric. ⁓ if the audience are familiar with this kind of fabric, ⁓ so you can imagine how it feels. but ⁓ I can print any structure. translate any idea. So really there is no limitation but our imagination using this technology. Wow. And how has AI accelerated what you're doing? What's the biggest thing that it's helped with everything? Yeah. Great question. ⁓ I think like the if we need to choose one, ⁓ one of the biggest ⁓ benefits is that it's ⁓ knowing the printer that I'm working with so well that the code itself is in such a high quality that I don't have any mistakes in my prints. So it's generating in my code. At the end of the day, like at the file, the garment is just a code. So integrated it with AI, ⁓ I can actually get better quality, faster results, and less ⁓ use of materials. So now every time I print a garment, I print it to shape. I don't cut anything. I just print whatever I need ⁓ to the exact size. ⁓ And then it's really easy for me to just assemble the clothing together. But the whole process is started with a prompt. The prompt I give to my software is a picture of a pattern. So let's say I'm taking a floral print and I put the pattern making, like the shape of the garment, which is a traditional fabric ⁓ file. It's called DXF, it's just a normal file for the pattern making. ⁓ today everything we wear is ⁓ most likely didn't made with ⁓ ruler and paper anymore. We use softwares. So I'm taking these files that ⁓ these softwares can produce and put it in my AI ⁓ tool. ⁓ and then the the rest is being done by the AI. It's know how to translate the floral print and the DXF file and merge them together. And then I just ask the printer like which which printer I'm gonna use for this work. So then the the G code is just ⁓ perfect ⁓ perfectly done. Amazing. That's all the questions from my side. But Ben, did you have any other questions for Danita? speaker-1: No, it's just it's just been a fun thing to see because I so Denita and I met years and years and years ago. ⁓ in in New York, I think it was, ⁓ a kind of microfactory innovation thing. ⁓ and she's been you've been lodged in my head as ⁓ kind of 3D printing pioneer ever since. So the reason that we invite you on ⁓ was it was just fascinating to see you pop up at Figma Config, ⁓ and talking about just how embedded AI has become in the same kind of process. Because I think people think about 3D printing as a living somewhere on its own as like a little island and ⁓ and and it's experimental and ⁓ and it's progressing. But I think maybe people don't realize how quite how embedded it's can become into the overall process or the role that AI plays directly in it. So you know it's been great having you joining us for like 10 minutes of this show. Denit, very different format from usual. ⁓ I intend at some point later in the year or early next year to get you on the one to one interview show and go a little bit deeper into these things. But hopefully this has given the audience a quick overview ⁓ and we really appreciate you joining. speaker-0: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. We still have fifteen minutes of our usual recording time. So I do have a few news stories that I want to talk about. So I'll get into those now and Ben you can give us your answers. So one thing that stood out to me this week was that it was announced that Salesforce has invested in Calamacus, so an AI platform backed by shareholders and One of those shareholders is Brunello Cuccinelli, who I know you've spoken to or about on the Interline before. So what caught my eye about this story is that the company's has this vision of pageless websites and applications where AI agents understand each visitor's intent and can assemble these personalized digital experiences. This really got me thinking: do you think it's this new era of real time personalized e-commerce. And as customers' expectations evolve around this, do you think that big brands need to invest in AI to create these kind of digital experiences for e-commerce in order to stay competitive and yeah, remain relevant in terms of their digital experience? speaker-1: Yeah, so the relationship between this product and Brunello Cuccinelli, the brand, is a slightly complicated one. But ⁓ so I interviewed ⁓ Francesco Bottigliero, who is jointly the head of humanistic technology at Brunello Cuccinelli, but also the CEO of a company called Solome AI, which is ⁓ headquartered in Solomeo, which is the the the town that is headquarters at Brunello Cuccinelli, ⁓ is a part of the Brunello Cuccinelli Foundation, the Foro della Arte, I think it is. ⁓ So it's a complicated one. It's it's an instance of a brand kind of developing a ⁓ an AI project that it that it deploys for itself. So the first place that Calamacus is used is on Brunello Cuccinelli's corporate website and on Brunello Cuccinelli's e-commerce website as well as the default mode. So you can switch back to traditional kind of storefront, but they they deploy this as the straightforward one. Now I would encourage anybody who's interested in this to listen to that conversation with Francesco. It's about an hour long. It's a it's one of our deep interviews, but he gets into some of the philosophy behind this, how it relates to the experiences they want consumers to have, what it means as a as a kind of a capitalist brand to deploy this sort of stuff. It's a fascinating conversation, one of my favorite interviews. And I actually have Francesco joining me on stage in Paris at ⁓ Premier Vision in a couple of weeks on the first of September as well to talk about this. Now, the story that's specifically here this week is that not only have they deployed it successfully within Ronaldo Cuccinelli's own operations, I think it's been clear to them for a while that it's also a viable product or a viable platform to deploy across other brands as well and that other companies are interested in it. So I think it was this kind of investment and this sort of like wide recognition of it was inevitable at some point. Now specifically what it is, again, I'm really summarizing the the interview there, but it is composable e commerce storefronts, composable web pages. So traditionally if you and I go to an e com storefront, Or an or a marketplace. Like if you open Amazon.co.uk and I open Amazon.co.uk, even if we like the same things, we're gonna be shown different products up front. That's your traditional kind of A B C testing and stuff where you're like the personalization happens at the offer level, where it's like, show this guy some of these things, show this lady some of these things, because that's what they're interested in and they're more likely to convert. The Calamacos approach is that the page itself is actually built for you at real time, ⁓ at runtime. So what you end up with is not just, okay, I'll scroll through the same wireframe that you do, but it's going to have different stuff in it. It's actually the wireframe is going to look different. And the the reason that this is so interesting to me is people talk a lot about AI as the highest intent and most personalized conversion channel. We've talked about this before on this show. Theoretically, if I'm having a conversation with a chatbot and it then recommends that I go visit a brand or a retailer storefront, Theoretically, that conversation is loaded with context about what I want. And if you're able to pass over that context to the brand or the retailer, they should be able to show you something very personalized to what you want. The bet here is that they should be able to actually build the website, build the page in real time. And I think if you think about this from Salesforce's point of view, you think about it from any other retailer's point of view. That's a desirable thing to do because you can put high value inventory in front of people who have high intent. ⁓ and the the odds are that they will ⁓ they will convert from there. I think there's a much deeper conversation. It's one I've had with Francesco, it's one we're gonna have again in the future about doing the same thing for software and applications as well. ⁓ like you sit down, we're recording this on Ribbiside, but you wanna sit down and interact with C R ⁓ and ERP, a PLM or what have you, like having it actually just be a library of tools on the back end that then assembles itself in real time to what you need is fascinating and I personally do think that represents the future of software in general. speaker-0: So the next story is about Sheen. I know Sheen's been in the news a lot lately, and we also have previously spoken about Sheen's IPO. So this week there's been a lot of talk about Sheen again because the company issued a new prospectus, and basically analysis think that it shows slowing growth and also lower profitability than people might have expected from Sheen. So we tend to think about Sheen as a completely different kind of business. And that's why it's been so disruptive and different to other brands and retailers out there. Do you think that all this news and all this talk support this theory? Or do you think it's maybe evidence that Sheen is less unique than people might think? speaker-1: Yeah, so I've been on the record about mm the way that the EU and France and stuff and so on have approached Sheehan over the last year or so as saying, I don't think you can regulate away demand and I don't think you can regulate away a business model. Now I I still stick to that, but obviously that attempt at regulation and the desire to rein in Sheehan that you see across Europe and ⁓ and in America and in the UK where you've tried to close like de minimis shipping loopholes and things like that. That's all based on the ⁓ understanding that Sheehan is something different. It is a huge scale, massive value overseas disruption. To domestic business models that ⁓ regulators and governments think have an inherent disadvantage when be when they're kind of held to a single country. ⁓ they have a disadvantage in terms of duty, they have a disadvantage in the sense that they are reliant on the same kind of ⁓ overseas supply chain and everything else. So the the the assumption has been that the playing field is uneven and that Sheehan has an advantage. now the what we're seeing now is you and I talked previously about Sheehan's IPO target being about half of what people expected it to be a couple of years ago. The new analysis that's out there is based on a prospectus that I believe is published ⁓ at the weekend, last weekend by the time people listened to this. ⁓ and what that prospectus shows is that d for all of its scale, for all of its speed, for all of its kind of ⁓ touted disruptive potential, Sheehan makes very thin margins. makes a lot products, it fork it it it floods of the zone, as it were, in terms of inventory and everything else. In other words, she and is a brand and a retailer the same way as any other. And I think what this represents in a more broad sense is there's been this idea that these kind of digital overseas disruptors feel more like tech companies and they should be valued more like tech companies and they should be feared more like tech companies. The more we see behind the curtain, ⁓ I think the more we realize that that tech advantage only gets you so far. And that you are still in the business, the same business of fashion that everybody else is, rather than a fundamentally different one. So companies that have been disrupted by Xehan, companies that fear it. Like we talked last week, I think, about innovation and advancement in the value space and how nice that is to see. ⁓ and I think I would take this now as further evidence that extreme value, kind of affordable, ⁓ like high volume fashion is up for grabs. ⁓ like d if you wanna play in that space, don't consider it as cornered by Sheehan and Timu. There's there's still stuff to go after here 'cause they are potentially not as scary a company as people have made them out to be. speaker-0: So the final story that I want to talk about is about two announcements that we've seen this week, and they're actually kind of in a similar space to what we just spoke about with the Kalamacas story. So the first thing is that Daydream, who I know you've interviewed before, have announced that they're going to be offering their platform directly to brands and retailers. To deploy their own ecosystems, so the model they've created but delivered as a service rather than a partnership. And also there's been an announcement that THG Ingenuity, who again you've also covered when you visited the THG studios a few months ago, are offering what they call their AI stylist, which is a virtual try-on. And this is in partnership with Google as an app on Google's cloud marketplace, so anyone can use it. So I wanted to get your take on all of this and do you think that there's a pattern here? speaker-1: So do think there's a pattern here. And part of it is there's there's two in fact. One is the one that those companies would like to talk about, and one is the one that I don't think they would. So ⁓ when I interviewed Daydream, I interviewed the CTO, Maria Belisilva, I think it was towards the end of 2025 or early 2026. ⁓ very, very smart woman ⁓ who has ⁓ put a lot of thought into how people interact with AI and how that then feeds into product discovery and recommendations. I I hate to just keep pointing people to other interviews, but I would encourage people to go and listen to that one because there's a particularly pertinent thing that Marie said, which was there's a wide variety of kind of cultural variables and other things that go into the consumer vocabulary that they use to express what they want from fashion. So people don't just go in and say I am looking for a dress with this neckline and this material. It needs this construction. It needs this word, that kind of thing. What they will say is, I want it to look like this thing I saw in this film. I want to wear it in this particular use case and so on. Now, historically you would have had to go and do that through Daydream directly as an application. So you would have to download Daydream. You would have to have your interaction with it. Their catalog is populated, I believe, with brands that they have previously partnered with. And they will then, at the end of the conversation, they will say, Here you go, let's present you with these options. You can then refine them more visually and so on. This turn now is them saying, well, let's take that same technology layer and that same understanding of interaction and interface, and let's make it available as a product that brands and retailers can buy and deploy on their own rather than having to have their consumers go through daydream. Now, it's a good business turn for them. It gives them a it gives them a new market. It's interesting for brands and retailers that have not. either wanted to or been able to build this kind of thing for themselves, it's also to a to some extent an admission that that sort of platform has maybe not secured as much of the user base as it could have done on its own. ⁓ like if you if you're creating this kind of business, your initial play is how much of this can I own? How many people are going to come directly to my app? How many people come directly to my platform? How can I monetize handing that off to ⁓ to the brands afterwards? If you do that successfully, if you get sufficient amounts of it, you don't then need to sell your platform any other way. Selling your platform another way is a great other additional revenue stream, but it's also a testament of the fact that I think AI interactions like this are not going to become kind of balkanized into individual apps and stuff the way that people maybe thought that they would be. The THG Ingenuity, God, that's a hard ⁓ name to pronounce ⁓ play is a little bit different, but it's fundamentally the same thing. So THG stands for the Hook Group. They're a massive ⁓ kind of ⁓ multibrand product company here in the UK, but they also offer fulfillment as a service, warehousing as a service, and a content studio as well. It was the content studio that I visited for the Topshop AI ⁓ catwalk thing a couple of months ago. There's a photo there somewhere on that article of me actually trying out this service, ⁓ on a kiosk thing that was that was there. ⁓ they'll make it available through Google Cloud Marketplace. ⁓ For basically the same reason. Right. The they so they're able to do they can do this as a service for brands, ⁓ and and their initial intake is companies that want to come work with them and have them provide this directly to them. There's a limit to how far that scales. ⁓ and I think if you're a provider like that and putting it on a marketplace so that people can then just ⁓ get it ⁓ through the the Google Cloud platform, deploy it across their own infrastructure and so on. Again, it's another smart way to say AI is able to change one or more elements of the way people interface with brands and products and stuff. ⁓ it's maybe not compelling enough in its own right for people to go and interact with different applications and to do their shopping in multiple different kind of different little pockets and stuff. But if we're able collectively to just uplift the whole e infrastructure and and put this in as many places as possible, that's probably likely to lead to more change long term. speaker-0: Amazing, that's all the stories this week. speaker-1: Perfect, Grace. ⁓ different format, as I said, for listeners this time around. It's nice to nice to have a different guest on. I think sometimes we may we may do this. The bulk of the time this show is still gonna be the quickfire conversations between you and me, but occasionally I think we'll bring in external experts where it's particularly timely and quiz them on something. I will be back in the UK next week, so you will get my usual background and my usual audio quality back. ⁓ I'm looking forward to that.